Course Browser

Search and explore Duke Law's wide variety of courses that comprise near every area of legal theory and practice. Contact the Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs to confirm whether a course satisfies a graduation requirement in any particular semester.

NOTE: Course offerings change. Faculty leaves and sabbaticals, as well as other curriculum considerations, will sometimes affect when a course may be offered.

A study of legal and policy issues relating to the family. Topics include requirements for marriage, nontraditional families, obligations at divorce, establishing parenthood, and adoption. Grading is based on a final examination, class participation, and written work relating to a visit to family court and completion of a divorce settlement exercise.

An examination of noncommercial property dispositions, both testamentary and inter vivos, including the following topics: intestate succession; wills and will substitutes; creation and characteristics of trusts; powers of appointment; problems in trust and estate administration.

The course will explore the legal and policy landscape of the HIV/AIDS epidemic primarily in the United States. We will employ a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching about HIV law and policy, including the legal issues faced by persons with HIV disease. Speakers will include medical specialists, social workers, and persons living with HIV. Topics covered include HIV-related stigma and discrimination, HIV testing and public health laws, confidentiality and privacy rights, estate planning issues, HIV criminalization, health disparities, access to health care and health insurance, permanency planning for children and other family law issues, employee benefit issues, and torts and HIV-related private lawsuits. There is an opportunity for student presentations on AIDS Law issues. In lieu of an exam, there is a paper requirement for the course. The course is helpful but not required for those intending to enroll in the Health Justice Clinic.

This seminar is derived from the three-credit Children and the Law course. Where the latter is a broad survey of the law governing decision making for children and the relationship between parents and the state that arises in that context, this seminar focuses in on the three areas of the law that tend to generate the most cultural and legal controversy: education, religion, and maltreatment. Students will be required to prepare memoranda throughout the semester on related topics including home schooling, curriculum reform, vaccination law, proxy consents to medical treatment and research, corporal punishment, and the Fourth Amendment’s special needs administrative search exception. The course can be used to satisfy the upper-level writing requirement. There are no prerequisites. However, because the subject matter builds on the foundations of constitutional law, property, and torts, it will be useful to have taken these classes.

This survey course examines topics in law relating to gender through a series of different theoretical perspectives. Topics include employment, the family, domestic violence, school sports, sexual harassment, pornography, prostitution, rape, affirmative action, women in legal practice, pregnancy, and sexual identity. Some film is used in class. Evaluation is by an end-of-term exam and three short "reaction papers."

This course is designed to provide students with a working knowledge of the major areas of interface between psychiatry and law. Basic concepts of clinical psychiatry and psychopathology will be highlighted throughout the course. The attorney and the psychiatrist roles in the commitment process, right to treatment and right to refuse treatment, competency to stand trial, and criminal responsibility will be explored using a number of methods. Discussion of assigned readings, short lectures, interviews and observation of patients involved in legal proceedings, films, guest speakers, and field trips will form the basis of the course. The students will periodically be asked to use the information from the course together with independent and group research to complete short projects and class exercises.

This course is an in-house legal clinic in which students provide legal representation for persons with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other serious health conditions. Under the close supervision of clinical instructors, students represent clients in cases that are related to the client's health condition, including: estate planning (wills, living wills, health care powers of attorney, powers of attorney); government benefits (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security Disability); permanency planning for children; health and disability insurance; guardianship; health-related discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations; health information privacy; and other civil cases related to health. Students are certified under North Carolina's Student Practice Rules.

Classroom work consists of a day-long intensive training at the beginning of the semester as well as a weekly, two-hour seminar focusing on substantive law, lawyering skills, and health disparities and stigma. Students also meet individually with clinic instructors each week. Each student carries an individual case load and is required to meet a minimum hours requirement. The course is offered for 4, 5, or 6 credits, with hour requirements of 100, 125, and 150 respectively.

AIDS and the Law is recommended, but not required for enrollment in the clinic. This clinic is offered each semester. Students must be at least in their second semester, second year to take this clinic, because of the requirements of the Student Practice Rules.

Students are required to attend the day-long clinic intensive training session. Students who have previously completed a clinic may skip the morning portion of the intensive.

International LLM students who wish to enroll in a clinic must seek the permission of the clinic's faculty director prior to the enrollment period. Permission is required to enroll but permission does not constitute entry into the clinic.

Ethics Requirement

Students are required to have instruction in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct prior to, or during, enrollment in the Health Justice Clinic. The following ethics classes meet the requirement: Ethics of Social Justice Lawyering (LAW 237), Ethics and the Law of Lawyering (LAW 238), Ethics and the Law of Lawyering in Civil Litigation (LAW 239), Criminal Justice Ethics (LAW 317) and Ethics in Action (LAW 539).

Available to students who wish to participate for a second semester in the Health Justice Clinic. Students enrolled in advanced clinical studies are required to participate fully in the case work portion of the clinic, performing 50 or 100 hours of client representation work, depending on number of credits selected (50 hours = 1 credit; 100 hours = 2 credits), but will not be required to attend the class sessions. Consent of Director of Clinic required.

Students in this clinic will focus on policy work rather than direct client representation. Students will work on policy initiatives aimed at increasing access to quality, comprehensive health care for low-income individuals living with chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS. The policy work will focus on barriers to access to care and prevention, including implementation of health care reform in North Carolina, funding disparities throughout the Southern US, HIV-related stigma, criminalization of HIV, and access to HIV medications.. Students will work to inform policy recommendations and advocacy strategies at the national, regional, state and county levels in executive, legislative and regulatory arenas. Over the course of a semester, students can expect to accumulate a wealth of hands-on experience in current and emerging health policy issues on the state and federal level. Students will conduct legal and fact-based research to inform policy recommendations, produce in-depth reports, comment letters, presentations to policy makers, and draft legislation or regulatory guidance. Each student will focus on particular policy project(s) and will be required to spend a minimum of 100 hours on their clinic project(s). We will have regular group meetings with students and clinic faculty throughout the semester.

IMPORTANT:Instructor permission is required for enrollment in the AIDS Policy Clinic. This course may not be dropped after the first class meeting.

Instructor Permission Required for Enrollment
To enroll in the Clinic, you must have successfully completed at least two semesters of Law School and have instructor permission. It is helpful to have had experience working on HIV/AIDS or other health health policy or related issues, or to have taken AIDS and the Law and/or the AIDS Legal Assistance Project.

This course provides an introduction to the relationship between law and poverty, including the relevance of legal doctrine, policy and practice to the significant inequality in income, assets and basic social goods impacting tens of millions of people in the United States.

We will begin by considering historical and contemporary trends in domestic poverty, U.S. social welfare policy, the legal framework under which poverty-related claims have been adjudicated, and the role of lawyers in combatting poverty.

Grounded in poverty data, policy arguments, legal doctrine and practice, we will explore modern government anti-poverty programs and issues such as welfare, work, housing, health, education and criminalization.

We will conclude by considering non-governmental approaches to combating poverty, including market-based solutions and international human rights, with an emphasis on the role of law, lawyers and legal institutions in such efforts.

Drawing on the rich expertise of those in Durham and beyond, we will occasionally be joined by guest speakers. The primary textbook for the course is Poverty Law, Policy and Practice (Aspen/Wolters Kluwer, 2014).

Issues in the legal regulation of sexuality are among the most contested in US law today. Determining a) whether gays and lesbians are entitled to the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples, b) whether the gender identities of transgender persons are to be accepted in public facilities like restrooms, c) if and when women should have access to contraception or abortion, and d) whether LGBTQ persons can rely on constitutional and statutory provisions providing for equal protection or nondiscrimination when availing of government provided services or commercial services, are all questions which either have been litigated in US courts in recent years, or are currently being litigated. Assessing the merits of the arguments of parties involved in litigating these issues requires delving into the disparate areas of law which converge in these cases. These areas of law include the jurisprudences of liberty, privacy, equal protection and the free exercise of religion, as well as issues concerning the extent of executive authority. This course will explore these issues through an examination of recent US jurisprudence, as well as statutory law and regulatory actions, as they pertain to LGBTQ rights and women’s reproductive rights at both the state and national level. While the primary focus will be on developments in the US, the treatment of similar issues in selected foreign jurisdictions will be introduced occasionally to present alternative approaches.

This course will focus on the role of the legislative and administrative process in intercountry adoption, wherein a child born in one country becomes part of a family in another. Intercountry adoption raises complex issues of law and policy, including those relating to the definition of family, state sovereignty, immigration and citizenship, human rights, and ethics and transparency. Not all countries participating in intercountry adoption are subject to international treaties regarding adoption and related issues. In nations where the treaties are in effect, implementation through the legislative and administrative process has been characterized by conflict and delay. At the local level, regulation of intercountry adoption through oversight of adoption agencies and adoptive families, has been uneven.

This seminar aims to give students the opportunity to understand the policymaking process by closely examining what has transpired in the field of intercountry adoption in the last 15-20 years, and considering what the future may hold, both within the U.S. and abroad. Students will be expected to explore and understand the intersection between policy, treaty, and national law, as well as the interrelationship between the legislative and administrative processes. Because the seminar will examine not only the law within the U.S. but that in other countries, students will be able to explore the differences in culture and policy that exist nation to nation and consider how those differences affect an inherently international issue such as intercountry adoption.

Readings will draw from the United States and international sources and will include existing and proposed legislation, existing and proposed administrative regulations, treaty provisions, court decisions interpreting these sources, academic and journalistic writings, and audiovisual materials.

This course offers a very broad yet brief introduction to the diverse and growing field of health law. Team taught by six different instructors, this course designed both as a general overview to “everything you wanted to know about health law but were afraid to ask” as well as a gateway to Duke’s other offerings in health law and health policy.